Looking beyond the production line: sport is for children, not the other way around
THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT: Mayo supporters during the homecoming. Pic: ©INPHO/Tom Maher.
Following Mayo's historic All-Ireland football victory, writer Colin Sheridan argued that the significance of the achievement "was not about sport or excellence or process. It was not about money or ambition. It was about people... It was about connection."
His reflections on these pages serves as a useful reminder that sport has a purpose that extend well beyond the so called “production” of elite performers.
Sports clubs and development systems are also cultural institutions that can create belonging, identity, relationships, and community across generations.
This is important because it challenges one of the dominant assumptions underpinning many current debates in Irish youth football (soccer): that the primary purpose of youth development is to produce elite players.
Children are viewed through the lens of economic value for future investments – the underlying assumption here is that children are for sport.
Youth football has been reshaped by a market logic of homogenisation, standardisation and efficiency. A central assumption in recent discussions - and arguably an illusion - is that the earlier children enter intensive training and structured learning environments, the better the results.
Proposed solutions are often reduced to increasing organised practice - or "contact time"- from an earlier age.
In tandem with the globalisation of sport and ensuing economic interests, the search for the "alchemy" of developing professional footballers has intensified. This has accelerated the push towards earlier talent identification, greater early specialisation, and increasingly selective development pathways.
At the same time, decisions about what counts as learning, how learning occurs, and how it should be evaluated are increasingly being shaped by external economic and institutional interests rather than the developmental needs of young people.
This is evident in the growing use of football academy certification systems, which have been described in the research as a deliberate strategy driven by financial incentives, while focusing on easily measurable and quantifiable outputs, and administrative benchmarking.
The result is a system in which administrative metrics increasingly shape coaching practice - in other words, the administrative tail is wagging the dog. Success is now being framed through a production logic.
Research consistently shows that no single pathway predicts senior success. Instead, elite performance emerges from the interaction of biological maturation, learning environments, coaching, motivation, opportunity, and long-term engagement. Reducing player development to a single intervention overlooks this complexity.
When success is framed through a production logic it highlights a common challenge in talent discussions: survivor bias.
This is a logical trap distorting how we view talent, player development, and coaching success. The professional player becomes evidence that the system works, reinforcing a narrow cause-and-effect narrative in which organisations claim ownership of successful outcomes, even when those outcomes emerge from complex interactions between the player, environment, social context, opportunity and chance.
In this way, production logic not only shapes how success is measured but also sustains the anecdotal evidence used to justify certain arguments.
Whether it is a national team slump or another infrastructure deficit, the debate quickly turns abroad. Commentators search for "the Belgian blueprint" or ask what Croatia, Spain, Norway, or, most commonly, England is doing differently.
Having invested £2.25 billion in academy football between 2012 and 2023, England is often presented as evidence for early selection, specialisation, and intensive academy systems. However, despite this unprecedented investment, around 98% of players awarded an academy scholarship at 16 are no longer playing in the top five tiers of English football by age 18.
Norway's success is also easily misinterpreted through a production logic. Although its elite players are often presented as evidence of an effective talent system, the Norwegian model is built around a child-centred philosophy, explicitly informed by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), that prioritises participation, wellbeing, long-term development and retaining more children in sport rather than selecting fewer at earlier ages.
International comparisons carry a dangerous temptation: the urge to cherry-pick isolated features from successful foreign systems to support a pre-determined narrative while overlooking the complex ecology from which success emerges.
Culture, history, governance, economics, education, facilities, coaching, family life, and community participation interact in unique ways within every nation. Football development is therefore not a plug-and-play model but a context-dependent system. When we isolate single variables from foreign countries without acknowledging our own unique dependencies, we end up chasing flawed, imported illusions.
This does not diminish the achievements of any country, but this hyper-fixation on external benchmarks, and the blind spots it creates, dominates the Irish youth football debate.
Success should be evaluated using broader criteria than the number of professional footballers developed. Player wellbeing, psychosocial development, educational outcomes, lifelong participation in sport, and the quality of children's developmental experiences are equally important indicators of a healthy system.
There is no copy-paste, but there are always things to learn – so dig where you stand!.
· A football pitch, sports hall or park does not generate participation simply by its existence or proximity. The significance of these environments therefore lies in their capacity to create meaningful possibilities for (inter)action, for play, exploration, challenge, and social opportunities that align with children’s capabilities, needs and family practices.
· How can we make multi-sport participation less a deliberate strategy and more an emergent feature of a culture that makes physical activity meaningful, accessible, and enjoyable?
· Football clubs and development systems are also cultural institutions that can create belonging, identity, relationships, and community across generations. We must invest where it is really needed – out in the changing contexts, situations and constraints of the “real world” where coaching, learning, participation and performance take place, and we must set high standards without being standardised.
The prevailing debate treats youth football as an economic enterprise in which children are investments and development systems are judged by their so called productivity. Sheridan's observation reminds us that sport is also a relational and cultural institution. It suggests that the value of child or youth football cannot be reduced to the number of professional players “produced” because its greatest contribution may lie in fostering connection, identity, and belonging.
We need to critique the dominant "production" narrative that increasingly shapes youth football policy and media discussion.
